Apology for Wales football fans over post-match rail delays

Some fans suffered long delays getting home after watching Wales draw with Turkey on Tuesday evening

Welsh railway bosses have apologised to football fans, admitting they have traditionally focused more on rugby.

Fans complain about a lack of trains and poor services for international football matches in Cardiff, especially to and from north Wales.

Senedd members said there were more problems during Tuesday night's game against Turkey.

Transport for Wales (TfW) said there was a shortage of carriages across the network on Tuesday.

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TfW chief operations officer Jan Chaudhry-Van Der Velde said new trains from a factory near Newport had developed wheel problems.

He said: "The result of all of this is that a number of trains have had to go into the depots for repair so we didn't have as many carriages available to us on those north-south flows yesterday as we should have had - and we are very sorry about that."

TfW chief executive James Price said public transport was run "right on the edge of what was deliverable all the time" so when things go wrong there is no spare capacity.

"Personally, I strongly believe we need more resilience and greater ability to do better on significant event days - and football, particularly, we have not had enough focus on that," he said.

"We focus heavily on rugby. We focus heavily on major cultural events. Our performance has improved significantly on both of those.

"We have not traditionally focused on football, but that is something we will be doing and we are going to meet with the football association."

He added: "I'm just trying to be honest and say at the minute our performance on football events is not as good as it is on rugby and we want to do something about that."

'You're always very sorry'

He was giving evidence to the Senedd's climate change committee.

Committee chair Llyr Gruffydd said he expected six services from north Wales, each with at least three carriages, to be laid on yesterday.

But after seeing pictures of a packed train with just two carriages on social media, he asked: "Why do you always get it wrong on these major events?"

"It's tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. You're always very sorry," he said.

"Surely if you know there's a major event you plan some sort of contingency."

Things seem to go wrong "all of the time when there's a major event, particularly north-south connections", he added.

Last night's final train from Cardiff to Wrexham was advertised to leave at 2205.

Mr Gruffydd said that was "frankly ridiculous" because it was 15 minutes after fans left the stadium.

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